For reasons that were unclear, I had to get an artificial heart. The surgeon first gave me a temporary one, for use until the custom-made one was ready. He said that I had to take it easy as this one couldn’t keep up with heavy exertion. The thing was outside my body, [...]

The Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal of former Phoenix high school teacher Morton Berger’s sentence to 200 years in prison for twenty counts of posession of child pornography.
Had he actually raped children, he would have received a shorter sentence. While I do think that conviction for posession of child pornography should result [...]

Someone invents this.
Charles H. Duell, commissioner of patents in 1899, is apparently misquoted as having said that “everything that could be invented has been invented.” However, maybe everything that should be invented already has been.

I had just purchased some new shoes, and was wearing them as I went to the airport to fly to Denver. At the security checkpoint, I was hassled so much over my carryons that I forgot the shoes, and didn’t notice that I was walking around in my socks.
A friend asked me to watch [...]

I was considering buying an LTO Ultrium tape drive on eBay. One seller, Dennis Resnik of Magstor Corporation (ebay ID dresnik-magstor), has IBM LTO 2 and LTO 3 drives listed:

IBM LTO Ultrium 2 drive auction

IBM LTO Ultrium 3 drive auction

The photo of the LTO 2 drive looks fine. But then I noticed that [...]

I was on a freighter that was transporting a load of live chickens across the ocean. It wasn’t very fast, so it was going to take months to get to our destination. The chickens came down with some disease, and we had to slaughter them. They were still OK to cook and [...]

In CSC 387 Foundations of Computer Science, we were offered an extra-credit assignment to form teams of two students, and develop programs for a game called FF Bombs, which is similar to Core Wars.  The programs need to run on a simulator for the sample architecture defined in Appendix C of Brookshear’s Computer Science: An [...]

Today I received email notification from Mission College that I was named to the Dean’s List. I had a 4.0 GPA in the fall 2006 semester; only 3.0 was required for the Dean’s List. I met that requirement in the spring 2006 semester as well (also 4.0), but did not receive an email [...]

James Van Iveren thought a woman was being raped, and tried to help. For his effort, he faces three criminal charges. Perhaps it’s reasonable that he should pay for the damage to the door and lock, but I don’t think he should be charged with criminal trespass. And he should be given [...]

If teaching children to eat LEGO blocks wasn’t bad enough, now you can also teach your kids to eat things with the skull and crossbones symbol.  [via BoingBoing]